If this is the case for you, more often than not the problem is your MacBook's battery. Sometimes it lets you move the pointer, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes your trackpad works correctly, sometimes it acts up. Trackpads and water don't mix well and can cause erratic behavior.Įverything About the Trackpad Is Temperamental If it's low, plug in your machine and try again-it really could be that simple! Next, make sure that jewelry such as wedding rings and bracelets are not catching the pad as you work they could cause the pad to read multiple signals at once and get confused.įinally, make sure your fingertips aren't damp or sweaty. If your pointer is jumping around the screen, there could be a range of non-serious causes-many of them down to simple human error.įirst, check your battery level. They can originate either from the Mac itself or from user error. More often than not, trackpad issues that aren't due to settings are caused by various hardware problems. Try disconnecting everything (keyboards, printers, gaming controllers, and so on) from all your machine's ports and see if it makes a difference. It's also possible that your Mac thinks another peripheral accessory is a mouse. Does your trackpad now work? If so, your system has been set up to ignore trackpad input when it detects a mouse.Īs long as you're running OS X 10.7 Mountain Lion or later, you can change this setting by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Pointer Control and unticking the checkbox next to Ignore built-in trackpad when mouse or wireless trackpad is present. The way to test this is to check for a physical mouse connected to your system, either via USB or Bluetooth. If your trackpad is entirely dead, don't despair-it could also be a simple settings issue.

As before, a setting somewhere around the middle should be suitable for most users.

You'll see a slider at the bottom of the window titled Tracking speed. Once again, head to System Preferences > Trackpad.

If you find the mouse's pointer is overly responsive, you could try adjusting the tracking speed.

How to turn off trackpad mac